Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
> is this kind of package bloat really necessary?
IMO yes. I don't know about you but there were two reasons why I didn't
use a precompiled kernel in potato. One of them was the inclusion of
unneeded drivers which went away with initrd. And the other was the fact
that it was compiled for 386. Since initrd removes the need for kernels
which differed in their inclusion of drivers, it made sense to make
different flavours that were optimised for common platforms.
> all these packages take up around 110MB, and if every kernel has the same
> number of packages available (approx 25 per kernel version), will bloat
> the Packages file to an absurd size.
That's easily managed by removing obsolete kernels from the archive. If
you're worried about it, start filing bug reports about any that you happen
to find.
> this will waste a lot of space on mirrors, and cause dpkg to be even
> slower than it already is.
100MB is a negligible price to pay for the CPU cycles saved from people
having to compile kernels needlessly. And I doubt anyone can measure how
much dpkg is slowed down by 20 extra packages.
> what's wrong with just one kernel-image that works with all i386 clones
> and the kernel source package for people to compile their own kernels?
> it's worked well for us in the past.
Well I never actually used any myself for the reasons I've outlined above,
and I supsect many others don't use them for the same reasons. In any case,
at least now that I'm running them I actually get to test them in that
configuration.
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